Stalownia (2025)
Projection on rusted steel, stereo sound
Duration: 5 min 30s
Duration: 5 min 30s
A massive steel plant, once the heart of a vast industrial zone built during socialist times in southern Poland, has opened and closed multiple times, deeply shaping the region’s economy and the lives of its residents. Its monumental structures remain part of the local landscape, still visible from nearby windows. For those living in its shadow, the plant was both familiar and unreachable - its tall flame occasionally lighting the horizon, its inner workings left to the imagination. Driven by that distant curiosity, Kucharski collected workers’ personal archives, reportages and found footage to construct a sensory imagination of life inside. Rather than reconstructing the factory, the video installation focuses on the emotional texture of its presence and how communities were marked by its cycles of hope, hardship, and eventual silence.
Sound Design by NAKANO BLU (Pablo Sanchez)
Sound Design by NAKANO BLU (Pablo Sanchez)
Installation view, Quartair, Den Haag, 2025